The field of the invention is in the semiconductor art and more particularly in the art of MNOS LSI memory arrays.
MNOS memory devices have important applications in missiles, aircraft guidance systems, communications, radar, and as program stores in small computers. Generally, the prior art devices have required large numbers of decoder devices to operate at relatively high voltages (i.e., 25-30 V), which are expensive to fabricate and frequently unreliable in operation, and subject to early failure due to defects and weak areas.
The best known prior art is that of U.S. Pat. No. 3,996,657 to patentees Simko et al, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,017,888 to patentees Christie et al, and "Avalanche Injection and Near Avalanche Injection of Charge Carriers into SiO.sub.2 " by Verwey and Hering in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Vol. ED 24, p 519-523, 1977.